.: Archives :.

Post Author: Bill Pratt Fourth generation Mormon Grant Palmer collected a mountain of historical scholarship on the origins of Mormonism and wrote a book about it in 2002: An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins. Palmer’s goal was to communicate to Mormon laypeople the progress that had been made over the previous 30 years toward an […]

Post Author: Bill Pratt In this final post in the series, we will review apologist Rob Bowman’s final thoughts on Joseph Smith’s golden plates. Bowman writes: Whereas the resurrection of Jesus and his appearances were obviously miraculous, supernatural occurrences, there is nothing supernatural or miraculous about a set of metal plates with engravings on them. […]

Post Author: Bill Pratt In part 2, we continued looking at Rob Bowman’s online exposition of how the witnesses of Jesus’s resurrection and the witnesses of Joseph Smith’s golden plates compare to each other. In part 3, we will compare the lives of the witnesses after their experiences of either the resurrection or the viewing of […]

Post Author: Bill Pratt In part 1, we started looking at Rob Bowman’s online exposition of how the witnesses of Jesus’s resurrection and the witnesses of Joseph Smith’s golden plates compare to each other. We pick up where we left off. Bowman next looks at the “contrast between the makeup of the collection of publicly […]

Post Author: Bill Pratt Mormons believe that their founder Joseph Smith was shown the location of some golden plates by an angel. These plates, which were allegedly engraved in a language called Reformed Egyptian, were then translated by Smith into the Book of Mormon. What is interesting about these golden plates is that they are […]